Hilarity Ensued: The Legend of Fort King

Growing up in a tiny town in the middle of the mountains does come with certain advantages. Among them a backyard full of potential adventure.

Kittredge is a small town with a population around seven hundred that lies almost thirty miles west of Denver in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. With it’s two stoplights and quiet town folk, if you yawned at the wrong moment you would miss the whole town. It contained at one time or another a laundry mat, a couple non-descript nameless bars, a couple thrift stores, an indoor miniature golf course, a four star restaurant named The Tivoli Deer, the Husky general store and gas station, the Hickory Dickory Dock bbq restaurant, and a two block long main street.

For two boys of a curious age, wilderness is always the first step into true adventure. Our first house in the mountains we called The Duplex. It was situated at the top of a short but very steep dirt driveway. Below the driveway was the hairpin turn of the road that led to main street, forming two valleys in which the kids of the neighborhood played. To the right was the ten foot jump into the valley in front of the Riggs place, with a little pond and grass and everything.

To the left was the thicket. Looking back, I would say it was probably about a hundred feet across at it’s thickest, coming to a point both at the beginning where the dam was, and at the other end where it went under the road and formed the Riggs pond. In this thicket the stream flowed slowly and the pines grew high and strong. And more than a few yielded hidden treasures placed at the top by a boy playing hide and seek.

When you went all the way through the thicket you came out onto a road that only had one ending. And it was never a pleasant ending. The owner of the property at the end of the road was known to pull over and yell at kids on his road. His family had money, and while we didn’t really understand all that stuff then, we were clearly from the wrong side of the creek for him.

But if you got through the thicket and got across the road without being seen, that was where the journey began for Fort King. Up the mountain about three hundred feet we came to what later became known as Fort One. A small rock formation that had a large jutting finger became instantly recognizable among the rest of the boulders strewn about the mountain, and for its sole vantage point overlooking the Husky general store.

A chain link fence ran the length of the rich man’s property and the only point where you could see that fence was above the empty lot next to the general store. A lot that in the summertime hosted the town carnival and artist booths, sat most of the year storing rocks and lumber or just plain empty, like someone took a scoop out of the hillside and put a fence on as frosting.

We would hold tight to the fence as we tried to swing around the corner of it and get to the free mountain beyond. Once, during this precarious move, one of our friends lost his grip on the fence and tumbled down the sheer side of the mountain landing in a pile of dirt in the empty lot next to the Husky. He got up, holding his arm, wiped his tears and said he was going home.

Not long after crossing the fence we came to a new vantage point, one high enough that we could look down at our sprawling mountain town. This became Fort Two, and the only way to know if you had reached it was to look down and see where you could see. These trips took the better part of the dog days of summer. Our parents worked full time jobs and we would get home after them having spent the entire morning and afternoon wandering the mountains.

Fort Three was the first rock formation on the top of the mountain. It was a sprawling site of rubble and trees and boulders and narrow places to hide and kings and knights and good and evil. This was where we spent most of those summer days. High atop a mountain at seventy six hundred feet, with views of not only our town, but the next town up the mountain from us, Evergreen, we played long into twilight hours when good boys should be home.

When my parents announced that we had finally purchased our very own home across town, my brother and I took it as a sign to visit the Forts one more time. That last time up the mountain we left in the morning around 10:00am and got to the top of Fort Three around one in the afternoon. This time though, Josh wanted to keep going, and see what was beyond Fort Three. Besides he reasoned, when would we be up on this particular mountain again?

Fort Four was about another hour along the top of the mountain. And to this day I couldn’t tell you what was so special about it. In fact the only thing I do remember about it was that from Fort Four we could see the combination of houses that had always enraptured and puzzled Josh and I… Deep down a long and winding pass called Kerr Gultch, nestled next door to each other as if in defiance of their sheer differences were The Glass Castle, and the Ice Cream Shack.

One a towering beautiful two story blond wood house with walls all made of glass and opulent white light emanating from within, the other a small one room log cabin with a small window on the front and what seemed like permanent frost on the chimney roof, and a big bright wooden sign hanging at the door: “ICE CREAM”. Attached to this very unusual home, was the stunning revelation that at one time, in the not so distant past, our own father, Chuck, had lived in this shack.

The move happened sometime in August, because we had barely settled in before we started getting ready for school to start again. Josh and I had settled into our (briefly) shared room as the last weekend before school started rolled around. Feeling nostalgic for the adventures we had left on the other end of town, Josh decided that Saturday would be the perfect day for the last adventure of summer.

That morning, Josh and I put out packs together, made sandwiches and filled our thermoses, as we set out to find the legendary Fort King. The front of our new house looked out onto South End road, and our back door looked up a mountain. We walked out the back door and took the long slow trek up the mountain. When we could finally see the beginning of sunlight signaling the top of the mountain we ran the rest of the way up and found ourselves standing on a dirt road. To the left stood a magnificent winter home of dark wood and floor to ceiling windows, and hanging above the front door was a sign that read simply Kittredge.

Because of the lack of any life, it was decided that this, was the home of the man who founded our town. And a subsequent tale of a lion hiding under the porch was invented to keep us away from the house. We turned the other way on the road and walked further on. Around the bend we came to some more houses that didn’t so much as look abandoned as much as they felt abandoned. We spent the better part of two hours looking around the houses, the unfinished out buildings, the boulders and the rocky structures.

When I heard Josh start screaming I jumped about a foot in the air. I started running toward the sound of his voice, not sure where he was, and even more scared that I couldn’t see him. I very narrowly avoided walking right over the edge of a cliff. I was running and not watching where I was going and just before I would have made that fatal step I looked down and saw a hand.

The sharp intake of breath stopped my forward momentum. As I looked from the hand holding the edge of the cliff to what lay beyond the cliff, my eyes plummeted about five hundred feet to the banks of the Bear Creek river below, and Josh barely hanging on to the edge. I very quickly sat down. I scooted my way closer to the edge while keeping as low to the ground as possible. I reached the hand and grabbed hold and started to pull.

Josh was pleading me to help him, to pull him back up. I was so scared I had all but forgotten to breathe. I grabbed Josh’s other hand and start backing up and trying to pull him up. Laying full on my stomach in the dirt, Josh snickered at me. I look up at him through my too long hair and he pulls his hands away from me. I gasp, thinking he is going to fall right to his death with nothing to hold on to. He points at me a laughs, and then while still dangling over the edge of the cliff, he stands up.

Because of the supreme wit in older brothering that he had inflicted on me by standing on that ledge and making me think that he was about to fall, Josh decided that this fort with it’s abandoned wealth, mystery, shelter, caves and other cool things should here for be known as Fort King.

Many times we played there, in stories of cowboys and criminals, superheroes and kings. At the top of the mountain above South End Road in the tiny mountain town of Kittredge overlooking the town, the neighboring Evergreen, the Rocky Mountains and somewhere in the west, barely visible on a clear day, the continental divide, lays a small outcropping of rock known as Fort King, it can be found high above the mansion on the hill and directly above the ninety degree turn of the Bear Creek River. Hiding somewhere in the caves and hidden places of that fort you will still find two boys playing.